Knitting nostalgia

I'm working on adapting a ballet sweater I have into a knitting pattern. Although you see ballet sweater patterns all over the place, they're always the wraparound kind, and strangely I never had one like that in all the years I was taking ballet. The kind that I had, I've never seen a pattern for one like it, so I'm keeping everyone in the dark for now until I work it out! It'll be cute though. Ballet warmups are so great for knitting inspiration though -- there are so many specialized accessories that you never see anywhere else but are completely and uniquely functional. I have a knitted pair of boy shorts: why? well, they keep your hips warm. But they've also come in really handy under a skirt in New England fall weather. I also adore all the legwarmers that were bought from dance supply stores way more than any I've tried to knit thus far. I think for a while I'm just going to de-engineer all these pieces to make up patterns. If they ever get lost or (more likely) eaten by moths in my apartment I will be so sad not to have a replacement. The only crummy part is that they're all knit with what looks like lace to fingering weight yarn on what looks like size 2 to 4 needles so it may take my lifetime just to make one piece. *sigh!* I need more hours in my day.

Just MAKE the damn gloves already!

I designed a new pair of gloves for myself, made almost a whole glove, and decided that I didn't like how it looked after all. I've since been swatching and swatching and swatching stitch patterns, trying to get the motif right for the back of the hand. Somehow this is more challenging than I anticipated. My swatch keeps getting bigger! Also it's a little embarrassing when people are like, "so what are you making?" and I have to say "Well, eventually I will make gloves. When I'm ready. But that day is not today." Or "Arrgh, I don't even know anymore! This thing is such a mess! It's a disgrace!" Yelling like that in public is just unbecoming. But slowly, very slowly, it's getting better. One day I will have an actual garment.

DPNs and hotness

I think the probability that people will ask me what I'm knitting while I'm on the train increases by a factor of 20 if I'm using double pointed needles. Something about seeing 4 needles instead of 2. Although, I successfully explained what knitting in the round is to a random dude who asked about it today, so hey. I made my brothers gloves and mittens for xmas -- some mittens for my older brother, some fingerless gloves for my younger brother, and some convertible fingerless gloves/mittens for my youngest brother. I was pretty burned out on making thumbs and fingers for a while. But it made me realize I need some for myself, so I'm designing a pair. I have some gray sport weight wool that just won't die (I've made a hat and some fingerless gloves for Alex out of it, and I still have 132 yards left. Weird). Speaking of which, Alex got me a niddy noddy for xmas. My pile of yarn is now transforming into pretty little skeins with labels saying exactly how many yards there are, which is how I know that I have 132 yards of gray sport weight wool. It's a beautiful thing. Normally I just look at the leftover yarn and wonder if it would be enough to make anything out of. And then when I'm not sure, I just go and buy more yarn for whatever the next project is, and the stash goes unbusted. No more! I made some chipotle hummus using some Goya canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. FYI, those things don't mess around. I used half of the can and it's wicked spicy. I like spicy though, so it's cool. But damn. This happened once a few weeks ago too -- we got a jar of chili black bean sauce from the Cmart in Chinatown and dumped 2/3 of the jar into a stir fry. Yeah. We were not very happy campers the next day. Oh, we ate it, for sure. We even huffed and puffed and blew our runny noses and exclaimed how hot it was, but we did eat it quite happily. The next day was a different story. Then a couple weeks later we decided to make some more stir fry with it, and thought "well, we used 2/3 of the jar last time, so if we use the rest that will be half as much. So that should be good, right?" Wrong. Still kicked our asses. So anyway, I'm glad I didn't dump the whole can of peppers into the hummus because burning myself this way three times would have been pretty pathetic. Now I'm hungry... gotta go!

Worse than I remembered

I think it's funny that my last post was a year ago, and in it I mentioned how bad I am at blogging. Ha! No kidding! My main problem is how many different sites I'm now required to update on a regular basis.... I gave up on MySpace. Not really awesome at updating Facebook either. I joined LinkedIn but I'm still not really sure how to use it. There's a new site called mybostonscience.com that's a social networking site for scientists and educators in the Boston area. I just joined, but already I don't really have time to do much with it. My photos go on Flickr, and I usually do manage to keep up with that. I had another blog somewhere else that I used to update more, but that sort of fell by the wayside also. And then in addition to that there is a knitting website called Ravelry that I like a whole lot, but also requires updating with pictures and whatnot. Fortunately that one integrates pretty seamlessly with Flickr so I actually use it more regularly. Then I have three email accounts: work, school, and junk addresses that need checking. Seriously it's just too much. But I'm going to update this one so that I DON'T have to update the others. We'll see if it works! But man, I don't know how people have time to blog and network all the time because for me it just gets ridiculous. Am I really that busy? I can't be....